Klem and Lisa Branner are no strangers to challenging terrain. Their Venture Snowboards — handbuilt in Silverton by a team of hard-charging riders — are designed for the burly backcountry lines of the steep and rocky southern San Juans.

But the formidable landscape of today’s waning snowboard market has proven too arduous for the Branner’s 16-year-old Venture, which announced last week it was unable to deliver any its treasured boards for the upcoming season.

“Venture Snowboards has encountered some challenging terrain in recent months. Circumstances beyond our control have forced us to make a tough decision,” reads a post on the company’s website. “Trust us when we say we did everything possible to make it work.”

The possibly temporary, season-long closure sent ripples through the delicate winter economy of Silverton, an enclave of fewer than 650 residents that is the only town in San Juan County.

“Every business definitely has an impact in Silverton. Adding a few jobs or losing a few jobs is huge,” said Laura Lewis Marchino, assistant director of the Region 9 Economic Development District of Southwest Colorado, which has worked with the Branners in establishing the company, which employed five to seven people. “I know their sales were not what they hoped just because of poor snow years.”

The recent dearth of snow in California — home to the largest concentration of skiers and riders in the country — hasn’t helped the snowboarding industry. But snowboarding’s troubles started before California logged back-to-back years of record-poor snow.

In the early 1990s, snowboarders accounted for about 8 percent of the visits to U.S. ski areas. By 2010, snowboarders accounted for 32.6 percent. That rate has fallen ever since, reaching 27.2 percent last season, a miniscule slip from the 2013-14 season.

The decline is troubling for resort operators who were counting on those avid snow surfers to keep the industry vibrant. The eager kids who committed to snowboarding in the 1990s, riding all day, every day, are older now. They have jobs, kids, mortgages. They don’t ride as much.

It’s just an industry maturing, rolling through expected waxing and waning, experts say.

But Venture Snowboards seemed immune to the cycles. The Branners had carved a niche in the dynamic, growing backcountry scene. Venture splitboards — which divide into two wide skis for easy uphill ascent and lock together for a traditional surfing descent — were renowned as the best in the game.

“The highest quality boards out there by far, but the whole industry has taken a hit with the lower snow seasons the past few years combined with the overall decline in U.S. snowboarding,” said Aaron Brill, the co-founder of Silverton Mountain ski area who worked with the Branners for a decade to sculpt his one-of-a-kind, ridiculously large carbon-fiber snowboard that weighed less than a child’s board. “This really highlights how hard it is in this business to make it work long term.”

The Branners launched an experimental division in 2012 that they called the Shape Shack. Guest athletes — superstars of snowboarding — visited Silverton and helped craft a suite of custom rides. The couple made compelling videos — behind-the-scenes glimpses of Venture riders plundering the deepest bounty around Silverton — to bolster their new designs.

“The Venture family has been such an amazingly creative crew with one goal, to make boards that could hold up to the San Juans,” said Skylar Holgate, a Silverton-based snowboarding guide who travels between Colorado, Alaska and Argentina every year, riding his custom “Skylar Special” Venture board for more than 250 days a year.

While Venture’s announcement caught many of the company’s biggest fans off guard, it. wasn’t all that surprising. Boutique, craft snowboard makers have labored to gain a foothold in a business dominated by heavyweights like Burton and the hedge-fund owned Mervin Manufacturing.

“It’s always a struggle. The advantage those big guys have is they can produce boards for so cheap and we are always trying to compete with that,” said Adam Browning, who founded Oz Snowboards in Wheat Ridge in 2010 with a unique plan to handbuild only carbon-fiber snowboards. “We try to be innovative to make it different. We have to be a better product. That’s what Venture was doing. They were definitely kind of the icon in the splitboarding world and the backcountry world.”

Jason Blevins covers tourism, mountain business, skiing and outdoor adventure sports for both the business and sports sections at The Denver Post, which he joined in 1997. He skis, pedals, paddles and occasionally boogies in the hills and is just as inspired by the lively entrepreneurial spirit that permeates Colorado's high country communities as he is by the views.

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